Absolutely no disrespect to Mistral, but why is Mistral Medium 3.5 so expensive?
It's more expensive than Grok 4.3 and the other OSS models like Kimi K2.6, GLM 5.1 etc
leaving out deepseek v4 because its way cheaper
> be chinese ai labs
> while claude and openai are in cold war
> kimi dropped k2.6 using deepseek's v3 architecture
> the same week deepseek drops v4 using kimi's muon optimizer
> 1.6 trillion parameters & 1M context
> both match or beat closed models on benchmarks while being 8x cheaper
> both build on each other's breakthroughs
> keep shipping frontier LLMs with far less or nerfed NVIDA GPUs
> and keep them 100% open sourced
the real battle is not between models,
it's open source vs closed.
@gkisokay Qwen3.6 27b is probably all you need for daily chat and coding usage
A decent image model and TTS is great too, I recommend Ernie-image (8b), and Qwen for TTS (1.7b)
That alone is good enough for 90% of people
@gkisokay Mostly agree with this list, however I don't think models like Llama 3 or Qwen 2.5 should be there.
They are way too old and frankly just not very good